Main navigation

Secondary Navigation

Pitt: Zombie Flick 'World War Z' Breaks New Ground

Published
8:01 AM PDT, March 28, 2013

Paramount Pictures

The zombie theme remains a consistent favorite for TV and movie fans and in a few months the mother of all flicks in the genre -- Brad Pitt's World War Z -- will hit theaters. Pitt is beginning to reveal details about the making of the film and explains how it manages to present this much-told story in a different way.

"The book focused on slow zombies," Pitt, 49, tellsEntertainment Weekly about the movie based on a bestselling novel by Max Brooks. "We chose to be more dynamic in that we wanted to base all of this on science," he explains. "So it's 'What if we had them move like ants? Or a swarm of bees? Or birds or a school of fish that’s being chased?' One of the first [questions] we asked was how to portray the zombies and how to do it differently because it's been done so many times and been done pretty damn well."

Pitt also said that timing is everything to pull off an effective zombie movie. "These movies are very intricate puzzles, and you have to keep winding the mechanisms and then trigger them all at just the right time," he said. "We give so much more credence to the end-of-the-year dramas. In these movies you're triggering emotions, too -- a thrill response -- but they are far more calibrated. You've got to be a bit of a technician."

In the film, Pitt portrays a United Nations crisis specialist battling a deadly zombie-creating pandemic in a bid to save humanity. "This unprecedented threat comes along, and it's going to end everything and everybody unless someone comes up with an answer," he said. "The interesting thing is how different those answers are and the way those choices lead to power shifts and life-and-death consequences."